Travis Knight’s film is keen to get audiences to laugh at it instead of with it.
Sylvia is a Lifetime bio-pic set in a BBC melodrama’s charcoal gray gloom and squalor.
In the end, the unexpressive Rodney Bingenheimer is nowhere near as interesting as his friends and neighbors.
Runaway Jury begins as a thriller and ends as a tract that doesn’t even have the decency to be well made propaganda.
Like its predecessor, The Barbarian Invasions plays out as a midlife version of American Pie.
Raja is a romantic tug of war that brings to mind both a Shakespearean comedy of errors and Bernardo Bertolucci’s undervalued Besieged.
José Padilha’s taut, elegantly structured Bus 174 is essentially a chronicle of a death foretold.
For anyone who doubts that a film that’s soaked in camp can’t tackle a timely subject, here is Lipstick.
Tsai’s elegy to a now-departed Taipei theater is also a beautiful love poem to the movies.
There’s no humanity buried beneath the life-is-bleak passages of Barbara Albert’s film.
Ross McElwee’s documentary reminds us to cherish every mysterious moment in our lives.
Since Otar Left is meant to play out like a fable, but Julie Bertuccelli’s direction isn’t nimble enough to carry it off.
The entire film is stitched together from a collection of long shots that stress the expansive emotional distance between an odd couple.
The film’s constant bloodletting is more desensitizing than provocative.
Peter Collinson’s The Italian Job is a freewheeling, completely unpretentious chase comedy.
The Singing Detective is tedious to sit through mostly because its every moment feels so painfully misguided.
The film shows off Bellocchio’s lukewarm debating skills.
Intolerable Cruelty ultimately doesn’t spend enough time in the courtroom and in the boudoir.
The humor is mostly milked from self-reflective, meta-movie badness.
Slowly, we’re informed of every betrayal and lie, of every deceit in a community that relies, ironically, upon faith.
Morris maintains his usual ironic distance, both wary of and fascinated by his subject.